The Dark Knight Piracy? Hollywood only has themselves to blame.

I was staggered to learn a few weeks ago that arguably the most anticipated movie of the summer is not going to have a worldwide simultaneous release.  Iron Man had one, but not The Dark Knight?  Something is wrong with that.  There is just no excuse for not having a worldwide release.

I would expect some significant piracy of TDK to take place all over Europe in the week preceding its release here.  I also expect that Hollywood will come out and make some sort of anti piracy statement condemning this inevitable action. In the age of the internet they only have themselves to blame.  Hollywood have wake up to the realities of how the internet works.

I even know of people who own yearly cinema passes, so effectively have cinema for free, pirate movies if the release delay is too long.  If the release had been worldwide, they would have gone to the cinema and maybe brought a friend who would have directly paid to see it.  Hollywood are throwing away revenue with this policy.

TV shows are another great example.  Sometimes the delay between a show airing in the USA to airing in the UK is as much as a whole year.  People can, say, watch the first season of a TV show, and then realise that they have to wait a whole year to see what happened, so they go on the internet and find that they can download the second season right away.  Is there any reason why they wouldn’t do that?  No.  It also just so happens that the only way to do this is by using BitTorrent like programs, and there is actually no way to PAY for a TV show, even if one wanted to – which a lot of people would actually do, if they could.  The vast majority of people on BitTorrent are getting TV shows because they can’t get them any other way when they want to get them.  If you actually looked at the statistics of the users of popular BitTorrent sites for TV shows, I bet you would find the majority of the users are European, downloading the latest Lost or CSI. (Also, note, you shouldn’t be able to look at the statistics for BitTorrent sites, and for good reason. )

A funny thing actually happened with Battlestar Galactica during its fourth season.  The episode “The Hub” actually aired in the UK on SkyOne before it aired in America.  This was due to Sci-Fi Channel going on a break and SkyOne not getting the memo.  As a result this episode was hugely pirated in the USA.  I don’t think you could find a better example than that.

I’m not saying that piracy is correct, but if companies want to stamp it out, they have to understand the reason why it occurs.  Staggered release of media is a huge reason for it.  People want to see the latest episodes of their favourite TV shows as soon as they can.  The internet makes this possible. Wake the fuck up.